Sequestration cuts starting to roll out

Crew members line the submarine USS Jefferson City when it returned home in April 2010. An upcoming deployment for the Los Angeles class sub and its crew has been cancelled because of the so-called sequestration budget cuts.
— U.S. Navy photo

Crew members line the submarine USS Jefferson City when it returned home in April 2010. An upcoming deployment for the Los Angeles class sub and its crew has been cancelled because of the so-called sequestration budget cuts.
/ U.S. Navy photo

The fog surrounding the San Diego region’s share of $85 billion in sequestration spending cuts ‑ estimated by a local economist at $2 billion or more ‑ is slowly lifting.

Elements of the emerging portrait include closed airport traffic control towers at the Ramona Airport and Brown Field, and at least three San Diego-based Navy vessels staying portside rather than going to sea.

At kitchen tables across the county, tens of thousands of federal workers prepare unpaid furlough days, forcing an estimated 35,000 of them to scratch out a tighter family budget.

Border Patrol agents envision having to break off tracking legal border crossings as the clock runs out on their eight-hour shift and no overtime is allowed.

At the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, planners are figuring out a lineup with a strong likelihood that no Blue Angels soaring the local skies Oct. 4-6.

“We’re planning on a MAGTEF (Marine air-ground task force) demonstration and maybe bolstering that with an even heavier Marine Corps presence,” said a base spokesman, Lt. Tyler Balzer.

Last week, federal agencies were rushing to complete their plans for managing with less money between now and the Sept. 30 end of the federal fiscal year. About half the cuts are coming from the Pentagon with the rest spread across the federal government.

Among them were the Department of Defense, which said it will furlough most of its 800,000 workers nationwide for 14 days starting in June, including around 30,000 at local Marine and Navy bases.

The lower federal spending may eventually amount to more than $2 billion for the region, according to economist Kelly Cunningham at the National University System’s Institute for Policy Research in San Diego.

“It’s going to have a big impact here,” he said. “Federal and military spending is a critical part of the economy and I think it is going to slow our growth, possibly cutting off a point or two of growth.”

Another economist, Marney Cox at the San Diego Association of Governments, said the impact from a general slowdown in defense work from sequestration, the end of the Iraq War and gradual withdrawal from Afghanistan may lead to an uptick in the unemployment rate.

On the flip side, the county saw its jobless rate fall to 8 percent in February, the lowest since December 2008, according to figures that came out on Friday.

“The employment numbers have been very robust, but aerospace and shipbuilding are lagging, indicators that the private sector has already began to cut,” Cox said. “The real problem is for the people in defense.”

At Navy Region Southwest, spokesman Brian O’Rourke ﻿said most if not all the command’s 25,700 civilian workers are facing the 14 days furloughs set to begin in June.

Thousands more at facilities such as the Fleet Readiness Center and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific commonly known as SPAWAR face the same.

At Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, Camp Pendleton and the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, slightly more than 2,515 civilian workers are subject to furlough. The bulk, nearly 1,800, earn their paychecks at Camp Pendleton, according to a base spokesman, 1st Lt. Ryan Finnegan.

“But we’re not looking at any training cuts, and no gyms or schools are other services are being closed,” he said. “We don’t know for sure yet, but what we’re also probably going to see is some deferred maintenance and things like that.”

Softening the blow for the Pentagon, which was slated to absorb $46 billion of the cuts, was a spending bill adopted earlier this month that lowered that figure by close to $6 billion.

Back in San Diego, the Department of Justice faces a hiring freeze and a 14-day furlough for most workers. Federal court operations in San Diego are expected to go on as normal, avoiding furloughs and closures, according to a spokesman for its parent, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Other departments planning worker furloughs of seven to 13 or 14 days include Transportation, Homeland Security, Environmental Protection, Environmental Protection and Housing and Urban Development.

Also staying home are the crews from the USS Rentz, a guided missile frigate, the frigate USS Thatch and submarine USS Jefferson City after Navy brass canceled their scheduled deployments in recent days because of sequestration constraints.

Also constrained is the Transportation Security Administration and Customs and Border Patrol. The agencies are furloughing workers, some starting as early as April 6, and border agents have been told that no overtime will be allowed.

Shawn Moran, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council that represents 17,000 line agents in collective bargaining, said he’s getting reports that illegal border crossings and drug smuggling is already on the rise.

“Word has gotten out that there’s going to be staffing cuts,” he said, adding the decision by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to release detainees to manage its costs is compounding the problem.

No overtime also means that agents tracking unauthorized immigrant crossings will suspend those missions if they extend beyond eight hours and no replacement teams are available, he said.

“When all this starts, we expect to get our butts kicked,” he said.

The reduction in spending for social service programs such as those administered by San Diego County with federal dollars isn’t having much of an effect yet, spokesman Michael Workman said.

The county Health and Human Service agency says its programs should continue as budgeted for the rest of this fiscal year.

“It’s in the next fiscal cycle where we may start to see cuts,” Workman said.

And after Friday of this week, the air traffic control at the Ramona Airport will shutter as part of the Federal Aviation Administration’s response to $600 million in sequestration cuts. The same fate comes to San Diego’s Brown Field on May 5 as the FAA shuts down air traffic control at more than 100 small airports across the country.

Not everyone’s worried about the loss of the towers.

Bill Howell is a private pilot who said he flies into Ramona about once a month. The Santee resident said there’s usually one or two other planes circling near the airport, but it’s rarely busy.

“I don’t think it would be a problem at all,” Howell said of the tower closure. “I’d like to have the tower. It’s nice. It gives people jobs. But all this doomsday stuff … I don’t think it’s based on fact.”

Some congressional representatives have been among those issuing dire warning about sequestration. But regardless of their stance on the smaller spending, all agree the across-the-board application is the wrong way to reduce national spending.

But whether they, the rest of Congress and President Barack Obama want to stop the next nine years of cuts the 2011 deal mandated is one of Washington’s many uncertainties these days.

The veil over the next round of cuts lifts soon. Starting Oct. 1, the second year of the required overall $1.2 billion in cuts through the year 2021 are scheduled to start. The Defense Department is mandated once again to account for half of the reduction.